MattyB wrote:Pro basketball player Troy Barnies, the pride of Edward Little and the University of Maine, just wrapped up his 6th season playing pro basketball in Europe. He stops by the B-List to catch up, talk about the game, talk about how hard it is to build a winning basketball program in Orono, how Coach Mike Adams went from a coach his parents didn't like to a being a friend and mentor, and has a message for basketball players headed to play at UMaine Orono: "Grow up or leave".

Towards the end of the interview he's saying Maine is recruiting the wrong kids .. Barnies makes a good point ..

This year Coach Walsh changes his approach to recruiting. He goes from finding his own guys ( which he can't keep on campus ) to throwing "it" against the wall with the JR college path .. He didn't even want Fleming but luckily he listened to the locals entering his first year...

bballnut wrote:Towards the end of the interview he's saying Maine is recruiting the wrong kids .. Barnies makes a good point ..

This year Coach Walsh changes his approach to recruiting. He goes from finding his own guys ( which he can't keep on campus ) to throwing "it" against the wall with the JR college path .. He didn't even want Fleming but luckily he listened to the locals entering his first year...

'bballnut': This must be my day. 2 nut posts which I agree with completely.

Question? Are you referring to Fleming's freshmen year last year or Walsh's 3 years ago.

If Fleming could be successful at Maine then so couldn't 6 D2ers at Bentley 2015-16, D-1 Nick Mayo EK, D-2 McDevitt, Franklin Pierce, the McDevitt who is going to D-3 Endicot, N. Gilpin D-3 Bates all deserved a chance at UMaine. Many times the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, but that is because what is put on it to make it look greener.

I am still in favor if we are going to lose in Men's Maine basketball then let's do it with Maine kids. At least attendance would be better and there would definitely be more interest.

Recruit 2 Mainers each season so you would have 2 coming in and 2 going out for a total of 8 Mainers, then use 3 scholarships for position players that Maine HSers don't provide, probably SIZE, have walk on campus tryouts to fill out roster and that leaves 2 scholarships available at all times.

Last good Maine team over .500 was 2009-10 when they went 19-10 with 3 Mainers (Barnies, McNally, Bernal) starting and if Socoby and Cook had not left the team previous years Socoby as a incoming senior and Cook as an incoming sophomore if I remember correctly they would have had 5 Mainers starting and would have been in the 20's for wins and maybe even have won a tournament quarter-final game.

In 3 years Maine has gone from recruiting freshmen to recruiting jucos and is now after 11 transfers the past two years have become either a prep school or a JUCO college developing the better players for other much higher RPI ranked D-1 schools.

End of 2016 5 transferred outVann moved up from 346 MAINE TO pre-season realtimerpi.com RPI rankings to 36 VCU, Little to 56 Colorado and Eke to 199 Rider. Harewood went JUCO and King went D-2. 3 D-1ers had to sitout because of the transfer rule.

This year of the 6 transfers so far JUCO McKennon, Transfer Myers, JUCO Howard, Returnees Pirovic, Reid-Knight and Bernstein none have signed yet that I know of. Anybody know??

Disappointed that Maine didn't give one of the scholarships available for Ryan Bernstein as he really did a good job filling in as a starter as a walk on. He deserved a scholarship for what he contributed to the program in a very difficult situation.